Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother came to IFFI carrying the heavy luggage of a Golden Lion from Venice, and the expectation that the patron saint of deadpan will have something new to say about families who barely talk to each other. He delivers a slim, haunted triptych in which adult children circle their parents like cautious satellites, testing the limits of duty, guilt and whatever passes for affection once the script of childhood has long since ended.

The architecture is simple. Three chapters. Three cities. Three configurations of kin who see one another rarely and never quite know what to do with the time. “Father” strands a brother and sister on icy American backroads as they head to their dad’s cabin for a welfare check. “Mother” gathers an English novelist and her two daughters around a fastidiously laid Dublin tea table. “Sister Brother” follows Parisian twins as they sift through the property of parents killed in a plane crash. A Rolex is seen slipping from hand to hand, toasts happen with a variety of different liquids, and the phrase “Bob’s your uncle” keeps turning up like an inside joke nobody fully understands anymore. The connective tissue is playful, though the mood under it remains bruised.

For anyone fond of Mystery Train, Night on Earth or Coffee and Cigarettes, there is an immediate sense of lineage. Jarmusch is back in anthology mode, working again with Frederick Elmes and Yorick Le Saux, whose images of snow, china and storage units feel calmly tangible in an era of slippery VFX backdrops. The Saint Laurent money shows up in the knitwear and coats, but the frames still feel shaggy and lived in.

“Father” is the chilliest piece on the surface and the one that kept expanding in my head afterward. In the car, siblings Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) talk like colleagues stuck in a lift. The subject is their hermit father’s mental health and the household disasters Jeff has quietly been financing. At the cabin, Tom Waits shuffles around in fragility and grift. The yard looks like a ruin, the truck is art-directed decay and the kitchen clutter aches with a very specific American anxiety about aging into insolvency. But at the end of this uncomfortable chapter, a watch glints, and a shinier car appears. The performance of poverty begins to peel. Jarmusch nudges us toward queasier thoughts of care curdling into control on both sides of the generational line, with money often the language everyone pretends not to be speaking.

A still from ‘Father Mother Sister Brother’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI

The Dublin chapter pivots from American rural precarity to European decorum that feels just as brittle. The mother here, played with exquisite frost by Charlotte Rampling, is a revered novelist whose books are proudly displayed yet barely discussed. Her daughters arrive like emissaries from two versions of capitalism. Timothea, Cate Blanchett’s civil servant, represents respectable policy and heritage boards. Lilith, Vicky Krieps’ fashion-adjacent chancer, sells vibes and influence while pretending she has an Uber budget. The apartment is a marvel of Saint Laurent-sponsored tidiness, all burgundy tailoring and coordinated cakes, and the conversation never quite finds a natural temperature.

What Jarmusch understands, and what Rampling plays to the hilt, is how “good manners” function as a class weapon. The mother’s clipped gratitude and fixation on the correct way to pour tea, even her tiny recoil when coats land on the chair, all become strategies for keeping real questions out of the room. The daughters collude and resist in small ways, by instinctively hiding ‘wrongdoings’ behind backs, sharing half-true work updates, and even disguising a girlfriend as a driver. The comedy is dry and constant, which only sharpens the sense of lives arranged around avoidance.

A still from ‘Father Mother Sister Brother’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI

“Sister Brother” moves into looser, more openly tender territory. Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) meet again in Paris after their parents die in a crash over the Azores. They drive, share coffee, and wander through an emptied apartment that once defined a life. Among them, the twins find forged IDs, old photos and a fake marriage certificate. The implication is that their parents were stranger and perhaps more compromised than the nostalgic montage in their heads allowed.

Jarmusch keeps returning to bodies rather than speeches here. The way Skye folds into Billy’s shoulder, or the casual rearranging of his hair before they step into the storage facility — the physical ease between them sits beside a dawning awareness that their parents’ story is full of blank pages. It is the gentlest panel, and also the one that most clearly states the film’s central ache of outgrowing the need for parental authority still making you feel the sting of everything you never thought to ask.

A still from ‘Father Mother Sister Brother’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI

Throughout, Jarmusch’s own score, written with Anika, wraps the chapters in a low-key shimmer that feels closer to a late-night radio station. Skateboarders ghost across the frame in ethereal slow motion, in all three vignettes. Driving scenes also use rear projection that looks proudly old-school. Compared to the more schematic quirk of The Dead Don’t Die, this feels like late style in the best sense. The jokes are softer, the cuts are cleaner, the cynicism is dialed down, though the honesty is not. Questions that critics and siblings alike have been asking forever, linger. Who were these people before we arrived in their lives? And what kind of ancestors have we been training ourselves to become? 

Father Mother Sister Brother answers with three modest, beautifully observed fragments that suggest the only way through is to keep showing up, even when conversation runs dry and all that remains is tea, awkward silence and a watch that may or may not be real. Trust Jarmusch to prove that the real horror of middle age isn’t death or decay, but the annual ritual of visiting parents who’ve mastered the art of withholding basic information.

Father Mother Sister Brother was screened at the ongoing 56th International Film Festival of India in Goa

Published – November 27, 2025 11:08 am IST